“Sensible,” he said. “And here I thought you were afraid of getting caught walking the streets of the Marsh hand in hand with a poor boy.”
My parents would be angry if they knew. Even if Arav had never touched me, if anyone recognized me with him, it would jeopardize my marriage to Tyrenx. I had taken to covering my hair to prevent this. My skin was not so distinctive, since people of many different colors come to make their way in Laalvur, but blond hair remained a rarity.
Because I covered my hair, Arav’s family thought I was very religious. His parents and siblings lived in the tiniest house I had ever seen, a little wooden room stilted above the water and creaking in the wind, but they welcomed me warmly.
I loved them, and yet I put them at risk. Arav had identified my real fear—discovery—but he had no idea what consequences it would bring for him and his family.
Entering their home, I understood why Arav had been so motivated to catch the medusa and sell its venom. Money would have vastly improved their lives. But Arav had been the only sailor to come home whole from that disaster—or perhaps not whole, but still able to work—and so he had made sure the earnings from their catch had been divided up among the families of the others. I loved him for it, and yet I still wished he could have been more selfish.
At first I was stiff in his family’s presence, hesitant to return their hugs, but they embraced me so readily that it was hard not to love them. They had given me Arav, after all.
I was especially thrilled to make the acquaintance of Arav’s sister, Eliyan, who was two years older than him. I had been starved of female friendship my whole life, and she accepted me with warmth. She was much quieter and more serious than Arav, and it was strange to see his mobile, expressive features on such a reserved face. But the two of them were close despite their different temperaments. Her approval meant the world to me.
They did not know who I was. I was already behaving recklessly by befriending them in the first place, but telling them my real name was too great a risk even for me.
Arav told them I had grown up in the Jewelbox and that my name was Ya-ya, and they never asked for more. They talked as though Arav would marry me, as though I was already their daughter and sister, even though they knew as well as we did how unlikely that was. It was exhilarating to spend time in their world, where we could all pretend.
My own family would lock me up if they knew. Arav’s concern that I might be afraid to be seen with him was well-founded. In my heart, I knew exactly what my parents would do to Arav, to his mother and father and Eliyan and their four younger siblings if they ever found out, but I could not bear to think of it. Down here in the shady, salt-scented mud streets of the Marsh, the threat felt very far away.
And Arav had just asked me about my fears and told me I was being “sensible.”
“I’m sensible, but not that sensible,” I told Arav, and it was all too true. He laughed. We kept walking, our interlaced hands swinging between us.
I turned seventeen, and my marriage loomed on the horizon. It might not be the end of everything, but it was an end nevertheless. Once married, I would live with Tyrenx in Nalitzva, and I would only see Arav if he could discreetly get word to me that the Shade had docked in Nalitzva, and if I could escape Tyrenx’s mansion, and if we could find somewhere out of the way to go in an unfamiliar city with strict laws against adultery. The obstacles were almost insurmountable. And for what? A handful of stolen hours a few times a year.
We both wanted more, and it was this heady mixture of doom and desire that made me grow reckless.
The Marsh is strung along the coast in the shade of Hahim, and the neighborhood connecting the sea-level Marsh to the height of the Point is an ancient warren of steep streets and sloping staircases called Breakneck Hill. Arav and I used to walk the length of the Marsh and then loop through Breakneck Hill. The streets there were so narrow that Arav could spread his arms wide and touch the buildings on opposite sides. It was almost always possible to find some little side alley where no one was around.
It had been more than a year, and we had hardly done anything. I trusted Arav’s self-control more than my own. He would not touch me unless I invited him to, so it would have to be my choice.
The first time it happened, he had just come back from a weeks-long voyage to Nalitzva. I had spent his absence alternately sulking and practicing my control. I had missed him so much that I could hardly contain a little bounce of excitement when I saw him in the harbor.
We went walking. It is a long, arduous walk from Hahim Harbor up Breakneck Hill, and I am sure Arav spent the whole time cheerfully telling stories about his time at sea—he was rarely silent—but I remember none of it. He brought me seeds and seedlings as gifts, knowing I preferred them to cut flowers. That I do remember. As soon as we found a modicum of privacy in an alley, I pushed him up against the wall. It might have been a funny image, if anyone had been watching. I was so much smaller than him. But he went willingly.
I had to go up on my tiptoes. By that time, he had divined my intentions and was already leaning down to meet me for a kiss. I wish I could say that it was exactly as I had always imagined, that it was better than I had always imagined, that it was wonderful beyond imagining. It was not. I was seventeen and I had never kissed anyone before—common afflictions, easily cured—and I was terrified that I would slip up somehow and permanently ruin his memory.
But I could not live the rest of my life without knowing what it was like to kiss him.
I was rigid and direct. The kiss was over an instant after it started.
Luckily, Arav was both more experienced and less encumbered by fear. And he was Arav: sweet, easygoing, pliant. He always possessed an astonishing ability to intuit what I wanted even when I could not communicate it. It was Arav who pulled us together and made us fit. He curved a broad hand around my waist and let it span the small of my back to press us together. He was warm and solid under my hands, and I relaxed against him. My arms rose up to wrap around his neck as though that was where they had always belonged. He slid his other hand under the cloth covering my head, knocking it to the ground, and knit his fingers into my hair. He angled his head to deepen the kiss. I could think of nothing but the feel of him.
There was more: lips and teeth grazing neck and shoulder, hands slipping under clothes. But all that matters is that when we broke apart, he looked right at me with those clear brown eyes, tucked a stray lock of hair behind my ear, grinned, and said, “Iriyat.”
8
Half-Truths
ALIZHAN’S LIFE WAS UPSIDE DOWN. Entering Ev’s home and meeting her family was an alien experience, as strange to Alizhan as if someone had given her the power to breathe water and explore the darkest depths of the sea.
They were strangers, but she knew exactly what they felt: caution, sympathy, fascination.
What did Iriyat feel for her?
Alizhan sank down into the hot water of the tub until even the top of her head was immersed. Her whole life, she’d thought she was alone in her nature. Some people were just born wrong, and Alizhan was one of them. Iriyat had cared for her anyway. They were meant to be. Iriyat’s blankness, her emptiness, was a defect that countered the over-full nature of Alizhan’s own deformed mind. The two of them were misshapen but symmetrical, balancing each other out.
But Iriyat had lied to her. Iriyat was not merely blank. Iriyat was like Alizhan. Or not exactly like her, but close enough: her bare hands were a danger to other people. And they were not alone together against the world. Kasrik was like them. He’d said there were more.
Alizhan surfaced, sheets of water sliding over her shoulders.
Was Kasrik alive? What if Vatik had already killed him? It would be her fault. She needed to find him. But what then? How would they hide from Iriyat? And how would Alizhan figure out what was in that book?
A priest in the Temple of Doubt might have insight. They studied for years and years to earn their robes, although they disavowed a
ll certainty in their search for truth. Their black robes were decorated with feathers, a symbol of their founder, who’d supposedly made all his choices by throwing a feather into the air and letting it fall to one side or the other.
Priests of the Balance were also highly educated, but Alizhan didn’t want to go near that temple. Iriyat spent too much time there, and Kasrik’s nightmarish memories echoed with voices talking about restoring God’s Balance.
Why would that be?
According to official Temple decree, there was no such thing as magic, and therefore it was foolish to fear it. There was only God’s Balance, the sacred equilibrium of Night and Day that made life possible between certain death in the frozen wastes and the scorching desert. The Balance was fragile, and both extremes were necessary. Were the desert not so hot and bright, nor the ice so cold and dark, the thin belt of the world where light and dark mixed—that perfect twilight where fish swam in the water and plants grew in the soil and people built their homes—might be as desolate and dead as the rest.
God’s Balance included eruptions that rained fire and poisoned the air, quakes that buckled and rent the earth, and waves that crashed and drowned cities. Destruction was necessary for creation. Death was necessary for life. Pain was necessary for pleasure.
Officially, it was right and good and sacred to the Balance to care for the old, the sick, and the mad. Unofficially, sometimes a strange and difficult little girl unsettled her family and neighbors by wailing in pain when anyone touched her, and by knowing things she had no business knowing, and so she was marked as an aberration, a horror, a monster, a disturbance to the Balance, and dropped at the threshold of the Temple to become someone else’s problem.
Alizhan didn’t remember that part of her life, for which she’d always been grateful. She remembered only Iriyat, who’d taken her in when no one else would, who’d fed her and sheltered her and tended her hurts.
Was that a lie, too?
Alizhan couldn’t stand to think about the question. Real heights didn’t scare her, but within herself, there were plenty of ledges she wouldn’t approach. What if she slipped and fell into those depths? How much anger was down there? How much pain? A fall like that would break her open.
Better to think about something else.
Kasrik had told Mar there was a second orphanage—not the one on Temple Street, but a different, secret one. Maybe he’d gone back there. Maybe if Alizhan went looking, she’d find Kasrik and the secret orphanage. It was her only lead. She could take the book to the Temple of Doubt to find out if any of the priests could read it, and then she could lurk near the orphanage until someone had useful thoughts.
But first she had to get back into the city without being noticed.
There was a knock at the door. Alizhan stood, sloshing water out of the tub, and grabbed for a towel. “Come in.”
When Ev opened the door, Alizhan was wringing water from the length of her hair and wrapped in a towel. Ev had such a deafening avalanche of contradictory feelings that Alizhan winced.
One of Ev’s feelings soaked through all the rest, a cold splash of mortification. Ev hated that Alizhan knew what she was feeling. But it was different from the miasma of fear and suspicion among the other servants in Varenx House: Ev hated it because she liked Alizhan.
It was time to say something. Alizhan had no hope of getting it right.
“I know you don’t want me to talk about your feelings, but I should just tell you now,” she said. “I know you think about me sometimes—not just about what I’m going to say next, or if I’m trustworthy, or the kind of things your family wonders about me. You think about my face or my body or my hair or the way I walk or how it would taste if you kissed me. It’s buried under all your other thoughts most of the time, but the thread is always there.”
Ev took a deep breath, but she didn’t deny it.
“It’s okay,” Alizhan said. “I don’t mind.”
“Oh,” Ev said, and the air in the room cleared a little. Alizhan had never understood why it wasn’t okay for two men to like each other, or two women, or two people of any kind. She knew exactly how common those attractions were. Ev was relieved that Alizhan didn’t care. Unfortunately, their conversation wasn’t over yet.
“I know you can’t help it,” Alizhan said. She always wanted to talk as fast as her thoughts went. But she slowed down here, because that was how Ev talked, and Ev was kind, and Alizhan wanted to be kind in return. Whatever was between them, it was fragile. If she said the wrong thing, Ev would stop wanting to be friends with her. “People just feel things sometimes, whether they want to or not. So I won’t tell you to stop. But don’t hope for anything, either.” Alizhan knew Ev wasn’t going to say anything, but she paused anyway. “Please don’t be mad. I’m not saying this to hurt your feelings. I like you and I think you might be the only person in the world who likes me. And it’s not that something is wrong with you, with your face or your body or your hair or anything. But you know what happens when people touch me.”
After a slight hesitation, Ev gave a slow nod.
“So I can’t feel that way about anybody,” Alizhan said. It wasn’t true. Desire took root and budded in her the same way it did in so many others. But it was a delicate plant, one that could never bloom in the cold, dark climate of Alizhan’s life. There was no reason to plant the seed for something that could only shrivel and die.
Alizhan wasn’t accustomed to lying, and she didn’t like the way the words tasted. But it was better this way. Safer. For both of them. “I just want to say that now, so you don’t get your hopes up. I hate disappointing people.”
Ev was hurt, but a little hurt now was better than a broken heart later. And she was trying her best to understand, because that was what Ev did.
And if Alizhan thought about Ev sometimes—her body or her hair or the way she walked or how it would taste if she kissed her—well, no one would know except her. Those stray temptations grew like weeds, tenacious and unwelcome. There was nothing to do but uproot them. No sense in letting things get any further. “I’ll try not to talk about this anymore.”
“There’s food,” Ev said, after a silence. “If you want to… get dressed.”
“We have to go to the Temple district.”
“Fine,” Ev said, and left immediately.
Neiran had cooked rice and stewed leafy greens with onions, almonds, currants, and cream. The dish was spiced so fragrantly and Alizhan was so hungry that she almost cried tears of gratitude when Neiran handed her a bowl. She barely got out the words “thank you” before she was grabbing a piece of bread and shoveling food into her mouth.
Neiran was impressed and a little concerned by how much she ate, but she didn’t say anything, so Alizhan didn’t say anything, either. Neiran was also worried—about Alizhan and whether she was lying, about Ev and whether she was making a mistake, about Ajee and Ev’s fractured friendship, about her family and whether they were in danger and distantly, about Ajee’s upcoming wedding and whether she would finish sewing in time—but following Ev’s rule, Alizhan commented on none of these subjects.
The meal was over almost as quickly as it began. Alizhan tried to wash up, but she was shooed out of the kitchen and into the bedroom, where she found Ev sitting on a mattress on the floor with Tez and two cats, an orange one taking up as much space as possible, and a grey one curled tightly into a circle.
“That’s Vesper and that’s Aurora,” Ev said, indicating the orange cat and then the grey one. “They’re not supposed to sleep in here.”
“Vesper and Aurora—like in the books! And I won’t say anything,” Alizhan promised. She was getting good at that.
Ev warmed with a mixture of fondness and embarrassment. “You’ve read The Sunrise Chronicles?”
Of course Alizhan had read them. The novels had occupied a huge portion of young Ev’s thoughts, exciting Alizhan’s curiosity. She’d begged Iriyat to add the series to her library. Ev wouldn’t like that answer, s
o Alizhan nodded vigorously. “All of them. But I think the first one is my favorite.”
Ev’s embarrassment evaporated once she knew Alizhan also liked the books. “But when they get separated in book two and have to find their way back to each other—”
“I hate it when they’re separated.”
“Me too,” Ev said. “But they fight through so many obstacles to see each other again. And they get reunited. I love that part.”
“Yeah,” Alizhan said. She already knew which parts Ev loved, and why, but for some reason, she still wanted to hear Ev talk about it. But sleep was calling.
The only light in the room came in through the door with Alizhan. True darkness—an enclosed room with no exposure to the sun and no lamps—was the only luxury Alizhan cared about, and she would have been pleased to discover that Ev shared her taste for it in other circumstances. But the air in the room crackled with nerves—Ev’s fatigue was no match for her anxieties about sleeping next to Alizhan. Alizhan was accustomed to sleeping alone, safe from the distraction of other people, so the artificial dark wasn’t as peaceful as it could have been for either of them.
She lay awake and tried not to scratch at her fingers, which were itching again.
Still, it was a moment of relative calm and safety in her newly upside-down life, and Alizhan was grateful: for Ev, for Ev’s family, for the food, for the bed, for the three little furry bodies curled up next to her and the steadiness of their breath in sleep.
Alizhan woke up to a man leaning over her.
She must have been exhausted to have slept through his approach. He’d been so silent that not even the animals were stirring.
How had he gotten in? Had he killed anyone?
Ev was alive and asleep next to her. Alizhan concentrated for a moment and felt Neiran and Obin in another room, alive, their sleep undisturbed. She couldn’t feel Ajee, but he slept in one of the neighboring houses.
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